Note: You are viewing the basic version of this site due to a browser incompatibility . For a better experience, upgrade to a modern browser. Below is a list of all articles for this project, however it is not layed out as intended.
A 2-year project involving the development of textile-­based modules and inter­faces for the con­trol and syn­the­sis of music during per­for­mance. A tex­tile in­stru­ment pro­vides a na­tur­al link be­tween action and sound, en­abl­ing al­ter­na­tive comp­o­si­tions and im­prov­isa­tions im­possible with tradi­tional in­stru­ments. Click the icons to the right to view videos and images from the project.
This was a col­lab­ora­tion with Jeannine Han of the Swedish School of Textiles.
2 years were spent re­search­ing tex­tile and sound co­opera­tions. The vid­eo above is an at­tempt at cov­er­ing those two years in four min­utes; from ex­per­i­ment to pro­duct.
Developing flex­ible tex­tiles that work­ed well with elec­tronics was the most chal­leng­ing aspect of the pro­ject. Pic­tur­ed above is a cus­tom weave design­ed to serve as both a signal bus and a sen­sing ele­ment.
First version of a PCB design­ed for Electric Ribbon. This cir­cuit con­tains a micro­con­trol­ler with cus­tom firm­ware, wire­less capa­bilities for com­mun­i­cat­ing sen­sor data, and a capa­ci­tive sen­sing system that conn­ects to the sen­sors embedded in the tex­tile.
A cus­tom Max external was writ­ten in C for the Electric Ribbon Device which al­low­ed data to be read wire­lessly and con­vert­ed into a scale or range of notes. It could then be re­lay­ed to comp­osi­tion software or used to synthe­size audio on the spot. Several com­pa­nion app­lica­tions for con­figur­ing de­vices were also de­velop­ed on Mac OSX.
Pictured above is one of the early proto­types for a vest that has mult­i­ple con­trol sen­sors on the chest. Sensors could be con­fig­ured like piano keys, or be trig­ger­ed by more emo­tive brush­ing strokes.
The costumes used in the first set of performances. The sensors were designed to be embeddable in any type of textile so all of the costumes could be fitted with capacitive sensors forming a true band.
A video announc­ing our exhibi­tion at the Nordic Museum in Stockholm. Visitors could con­trol the sounds of the space by exe­cut­ing various ges­tures in front of the cos­tume.
A very simplified version of the product design: Embedded sensors and micro­controller detect hand motions using the con­ductive threads of the ma­ter­ial. This data is in­ter­pretted wirelessly else­where to create a a response to the command.
Video (6 min). This video is docu­menta­tion of a per­form­ance from January of 2011 in Boras Sweden. The code for the Dream Room 1 projec­tions was com­bined with the Electric Ribbon project to en­hance the visual audio ex­perience. Also an all-analog touch-sensitive costume was created for improv­isation (seen left).